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The Impact of Processes of Policy Formulation and New

Gerard Corsane

In post-apartheid South Africa, the traditional understandings of
museums and heritage have been challenged in terms of how meaning
making, heritage construction, and knowledge production were
conducted in the colonial past. In a series of processes of transformation,
new approaches to museum action and heritage management
have begun to take shape and develop in South Africa. Central to all
of this have been the processes of policy formulation and new legislation
that have provided the impetus for change. The aim of this article
is to briefly chart some of these processes and the subsequent
legislation that have begun to affect the ways in which South African
heritage and museums are being reconfigured in a postcolonial and
post-apartheid era. This policy formulation and the new legislation
have focused on extending what is considered to be heritage by
including intangible cultural heritage. It has also looked at empowering local communities, with an emphasis on sustainable development.

The South African Crucible

Lawrence Hamilton

South Africa's post-apartheid context and a mix of African and non-mainstream Western political theory is felicitous for a positive critique of the two now predominant Western accounts of democracy. The context highlights how deliberative and aggregative accounts of democracy fall short in their attempts to make universal claims regarding democracy; and it provides the theoretical basis for an account of political democracy that better associates democracy with freedom, power, representation, and domination. The article argues that freedom is power through political representation, and freedom obtains if and only if the existing forms of representation manage power relations in order to minimize domination and enhance political judgement amongst representatives and represented. The article submit that, unless radical institutional change is carried out, South Africa will not rid itself of the legacies of these Western models and will be unable to generate the freedom and democracy its attainment of political freedom has now long promised.

Christine Winberg

Narratology is the study of the ways in which narrative organises perception
and experience. Narratologists understand narrative as a
‘meta-code, a human universal’ (White 1987), which is instrumental
in enabling the re-organisation of time, space, character and event in
the construction of meaning in texts. Narratologists draw on different
epistemological traditions, and develop different approaches and
practices. These approaches can be roughly categorised as belonging
to textual, inter-textual, and extra-textual traditions. The textual
approach is exemplified by the work of Vladimir Propp (1928/1968),
Claude Levi-Strauss (1958/1963), Roland Barthes (1966/1977),
Algirdas Greimas (1966/1983), Paul Ricoeur (1985), and Tzvetan
Todorov (1990). Narratologists in this structuralist tradition categorize
and taxonomize narrative form. Propp identified 31 ‘narratemes’
(the smallest narrative units, equivalent to morphemes at the sentence
level), which occur in all narratives in unvarying sequence; Greimas
developed a typology of narrative ‘actants’; and Ricoeur investigated
connections between time and narrative to typify ‘configurational
activities’ in narrative plots and sequences. These, and other, textual
approaches to narrative, show how texts selectively draw on narrative
resources (emplotment, ways of representing character, hermeneutic
and proairetic codes) in the construction of narrative meaning.

Monique Deveaux

absence of legislation that could dispositively settle the specific tensions at hand—for example, those between cultural recognition and sexual equality rights in post-apartheid South Africa. More typically, legislation does exist, but has had little

Post-apartheid Ambiguities at the University of Limpopo, South Africa

Bjarke Oxlund

Based on an in-depth analysis of the events that took place during a single day at the University of Limpopo, this article makes connections between current and past events in arguing that post-apartheid South Africa is underpinned by several layers of ambiguity. At one level the article seeks to demonstrate the continuing relevance of situational analysis as a research paradigm, while at another level it attempts to provide a fresh look at the dominant cleavage in South African society that was identified by Max Gluckman in 1940. Drawing on a mock funeral held for government-aligned student organizations in October 2006, which revealed strains and uncertainties in South Africa's post-apartheid society, the intent is to show how the government's failure to secure service delivery has created new lines of contestation.

Patrick Lenta

The following paper is a discussion of justice as a sign in transition, a
sign whose meanings in post-apartheid South Africa must be legitimated
by appeal to conditions radically different from those that
prevailed under apartheid. I wish to explore the nature of the transformation
of justice from the context of apartheid to emergent postapartheid
conditions and to do so by focusing on the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (the TRC) as an example of what can be
called ‘transitional justice’. A common view of the TRC is that its
rules for the implementation of amnesty and other related matters
should be evaluated in the light of ‘ideal types’ of justice. The TRC
must fall short of such ideal types, since its offer of qualified amnesty
to perpetrators of gross human rights violations in exchange for complete
honesty about such violations will be understood as an exigency
which dispenses with a crucial feature of justice, namely retribution.

Policy, temporality, and public health in South Africa

Theodore Powers

South Africa’s post-apartheid era has been marked by the continuation
of racialized socioeconomic inequality, a social situation produced by earlier periods
of settlement, colonization, and apartheid. While the ruling African National
Congress has pursued a transformative political agenda, it has done so within the
confines of neoliberal macroeconomic policy, including a period of fiscal austerity,
which has had limited impact on poverty and inequality. Here, I explore how
policy principles associated with austerity travel across time, space, and the levels
of the state in South Africa, eventually manifesting in a public health policy that
produced cuts to public health services. In assessing these sociopolitical dynamics,
I utilize policy process as a chronotope to unify diverse experiences of temporality
relative to austerity-inspired public health policy.

David Chidester

In 2003, after more than 10 years of policy debate and public controversy, the South African minister of education announced a new policy for religion and education that distinguished between religious interests, which are best served by religious communities, and educational objectives for teaching and learning about religion, religions, and religious diversity that should be served by the curriculum of public schools. This article locates South Africa's new policy for religion and education in relation to attempts to redefine the role of the state in the transition from apartheid to democracy. The policy emerged within a new constitutional framework, which ensured freedom for religious expression and freedom from religious discrimination, but also within the context of state initiatives to affirm cultural diversity and mobilize unifying resources for social transformation. Accordingly, this article examines South Africa's policy for religion and public education as an index for understanding post-apartheid efforts in redefining the state as a constitutional, cultural, and transformative state.